Boris Kocheyshvili’s exhibition ‘Cloud, Lake, Tower’ on view at the Andrei Cheglakov Foundation in Moscow showcases five decades of work by this octogenarian Russian artist through diverse media and the many different periods in his long and successful career.

The solo exhibition ‘Cloud, Lake, Tower’ of work by Boris Kocheyshvili (b. 1940) which opened on 22nd May at the Andrei Cheglakov Foundation,´s space in Moscow may not be on the scale of a retrospective, but it does manage to fit in all periods in the long career of this 85-year-old Russian artist.

The exhibition has a complicated prehistory. Curated by Tamara Vekhova and Maya Avelicheva inhouse curators at the Foundation as well as independent art historian Nadezhda Plungian, it was the latter who came up with the title taken from Vladimir Nabokov as well as the general conceptual framework referencing her favourite period in Russian art – the 1940s–1950s. And not long before the show was due to open, architect Alexey Podkidyshev suddenly decided to rework the whole design and layout of the exhibition leading to half of the works being moved and the rest reshuffled.

Over the course of his career, Boris Kocheyshvili has worked extensively in the theatre. Many of his artworks are evocative of stage sets or set designs, and he often makes reliefs – he says he was first inspired to use this technique which he calls a “mixture of graphics and sculpture”, by a friend who was kneading dough to bake a pie! Yet the artist prefers to keep the texture of the middle stage in baking, his reliefs are light like dough – some with tints in pastel tones, pale blue or pink – although most are white. He manages to preserve a sense of their adaptability, how they are not frozen or stuck in time and the scenes you see painted on them might still change. The subjects of these scenes are themselves open to some kind of possible evolution or development: there are gates either open or closed; two people walking through a ‘Russian landscape’ without stopping; houses piling up behind one another stretching into imagined infinity; architectural constructions like a solitary tower in the forest or a satellite dish on a roof, acquire a new life beyond their normal, everyday function.

There is a lot of architectural works in the exhibition which creates an extra dimension, as the artist explains: “I never owned a flat or house. So, I built a house inside my works. Especially a tower as the archetype of a house, as its ultimate embodiment.” In Kocheyshvili’s works one can indeed find several towers. But it seems this is not enough for him because right in the middle of the hall on the second floor of the Cheglakov Foundation there is a large tower made of wooden slats, on top of which there is a kind of replica of the artist’s hut made from reeds (it is worth mentioning here that just a few minutes' walk from the Cheglakov Foundation you can actually find the artist’s own studio.)

If in his drawings of the 1980s and 1990s Kocheyshvili streaked the surfaces of the objects he depicted to give them volume and render the certain characteristic lines of different materials, in his paintings of the previous (as well as current ) decade the artist chooses to highlight one element that interests him most from the dull reality around him by using some unearthly colour such as the brilliant blue in his 2021 painting ‘Triumphal Arch’. In ‘Palace in the Field’, which he painted earlier this year, the object of the title sparkles with golden reflections amidst a monotonous dirty, grey-brown sky and earth. But radiance in Kocheyshvili´s art can also emanate from people: in ‘Film Shooting’ (2025) the characters seem to be projected like moving pictures from a film onto the screen showing twilight in the wilderness.

Kocheyshvili scatters people with apparent randomness and ease across his works. “European art consists of millions of works, but there are few subjects - easel painting is especially limited,” remarks the artist, preferring to leave the positioning of his own characters to chance and the entire physics of space in his work can change. You might think that human figures would be standing up but here they hang in the air at an unnatural angle to the surface of the earth as though they are floating underwater. Limbs and torsos stretch or flatten depending on the subject and mood of each painting, relief, or drawing into which they have fallen as if by chance.

As an artist who worked professionally on stage set designs, Kocheyshvili understands that one backdrop gets replaced by the next and that stage sets are by definition temporary, literally made of “cardboard”, and that visual art, even when not directly connected to theatre, itself is far from eternal and that one ought to be more accepting of its transience. One of Kocheyshvili's favourite materials is hardboard, and if it is single sided, he is drawn in particular to the rough, coarse side. A deliberate incompleteness and schematic nature of drawing, and painting with a similar effect, and reliefs that seem to breath with life and never set – all these fit neatly into the same treasury of changeability and temporality. And no, for Kocheyshvili this is not a way to tell us about how we all eventually turn to dust, it is more a way of showing us his joy and thirst for life. Here you will not find elevated mystical coldness and detachment, or moral teachings like the fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Life for Kocheyshvili is not divided into right and wrong sides; it is valuable precisely in its indivisible wholeness, woven from a myriad of everyday miracles. A person walks, a house stands, a river flows – perfection.